I know you had to know Greek and Latin in some cases but with respect to overall intellectual challenge would it be as “hard” as modern college is given that math and science is much more complex these days?
I know something about 1780-1800 and it depends on the college. Take something like Pitt in its early years and it was little more than an advanced form of a one-room schoolhouse for a sort of graduate education. Cambridge, for example, could be tougher.
You may also get some good leads from
https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/3878/gslisoccasionalpv00000i00140.pdf?sequence=1
In general my understanding is that colleges and universities into the mid-1800s were places to teach you how to learn and teach yourself as much as anything. And to open you to a circle/club of other graduates you would be networked with (so to speak) during the rest of your life. They could be very tough and very expensive but you have to remember that there wasn’t 12 years of preparation basically provided for free to everyone during most of this time frame. There was some free education before the American Civil War but you really need to get into the 1900s before most states had a serious system of compulsory education to feed the colleges.
Now, going back slightly in my train of thought – college as a place to receive a degree certifying you as qualified to do something really is more 1850 and after. It developed along with industry and mechanization into more the form of college education we know today. Before that think of them more as “philosophy or thinking mills” than “diploma mills”.
Thanks!
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People who went to college in those days, very like came from an affluent family, and did not go to regular school with the riffraff, but were educated at home by private tutors, well prepared for what college would entail. So college was largely a social club for rich kids, who had all been academically prepared for the ongoing education part of it. Very few children who went to “public school” came from families that could afford college, or received a pre-requisite education that would enable them to master college course work.
Reported
A major purpose of universities was to qualify people for the higher ranks of the clergy, and for careers in law and medicine.
But if you could pay, and had reasonable attendance, it was unlikely you would fail. And the higher your social class and the better your connections, the less likely it was that you would fail.
I can’t think of anything about the 1700’s, but in the 1800’s English youths did not go from home to university. They went to grammer schools first, to learn the Latin and Greek they would need at university.
When they passed the Morrill Land Grant acts that was to have more colleges teach about Agriculture and Engineering as opposed to just the traditional courses. First one was 1862 and another in 1890.
It’s very difficult to compare schooling then to now; they had totally different purposes, totally different student bodies, different everything. The modern schooling progression is really quite different. The notion of basically all kids going to school at all, progressing to high school,graduating and then a large proportion of them going to college is quite recent, and in the late 18th century was still a fledgling idea in most places.
I’ve little doubt that a graduate student today, sent back in a time machine, would find college in 1790 baffling - and a student from 1790, transported to today, would be equally frustrated.
From about the 1820’s to about the 1930’s, most elementary school teachers in the U.S. were trained at what were then called normal schools. These were later called teacher colleges. Many of them still exist and were later renamed as just colleges or universities. Their academic programs were expanded so that one could study most of the things that most colleges and universities teach today. I recall one of my teachers in the early 1960’s (who was then around retirement age) saying that just out of high school she only had to take a one year course (presumably at a normal school) to get a teaching license. After a few years, the requirements were changed so that she had to go back and do a second year of training before teaching again. After a few more years, she had to go back again and take two more years of training to get a regular bachelor’s degree to continue teaching in an elementary school.
In the early 1800’s, any place calling itself a university or college taught just what we now think of as liberal arts - humanities, natural sciences, or social sciences. They didn’t teach education, business, management, engineering, nursing, law, architecture, music performance, journalism, media studies, art professional training, agriculture, etc. Furthermore, the areas of study even in liberal arts was more restricted in colleges and universities than now.
My brother’s old grammar school was originally founded as a school for the poor in the 1200s, and some students certainly went from there to University in its earlier years, though the records are a bit scanty for those who didn’t become famous afterwards.
Many of the early English schools were actually originally founded as charity schools, with the intent to educate poor students to enable them to access University, including the ones now better known for being a bunch of terribly posh snobs, though private tutoring was always an option as well for those who could afford it.
Well, there WAS a lot less to learn. Not as much history, science was simpler, as was medicine.
But if you understood Latin, I’m sure you’d graduate. In the little I have read about them, they seemed more like good ol boy clubs than places to actually learn anything. Even reading George Mallory’s biography, his time at Cambridge in 1905 seemed more about passing the blue blood test. The curricula seemed to be self-driven rather than passed from above.
I thought that they were generally for elite families to send their male children to be educated for the church, the law, or medicine. Latin was the common language of all of these, so it would be taught from an early age. Reading classical Latin authors was foundational. Tutors were a fixture in wealthy families.
Could you pass the admissions test for Harvard in 1869?
I had a bit of trouble giving the quantity of the penult for *confido *.
I recall some mention that the Land Grant schools that started in the late 1800s formed the model for the modern notion of a college with more technical fields of study like agriculture and engineering.
In science fields a lot of what is taught today was not known 100 years ago such as DNA structure , nuclear fission, etc.
Is that for real?
My Harvard educated 1869 doctor doesn’t believe in germ theory, and the importance of washing before surgery, but by god he can translate Greek! I feel cured already.
O.K., so to be admitted to Harvard in 1869, you had to know some Latin and Greek, some geography and history (mostly of ancient Rome and Greece), and the mathematics that nowadays is usually taught to high school juniors. (So there are no questions about calculus, which is often taught to high school seniors these days.) You didn’t have to know any science or modern languages or modern history or literature or art.
Take a look at this article in the February 1869 issue of The Atlantic written by Charles W. Eliot, who had just become president of Harvard:
He says that he was going to change Harvard into a place that teaches much more subjects, more or less the subjects now considered to be the standard liberal arts (humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences) fields. And he did. He was president until 1909, and he changed Harvard into something like a modern university. So to get into Harvard in 1869, you had to know a fair amount about a very narrow set of subjects. Those subjects included Latin and Greek (which are seldom taught to high school students these days, a limited amount of mathematics, and a limited amount of geography and history. These days you have to know about a larger amount of subjects to get into college.
Lord Eldon, who attended Oxford in 1770, recalled :
I was examined in Hebrew and History. “What is the Hebrew for Place of a Skull?” said the Examiner. “Golgotha,” I replied. “Who founded University College?” “King Alfred.” “Very well,sir,” said the Examiner, "then you are competent for your degree. "
[quoted in Parson Woodforde’s Diary]
Rich men, who made up a large portion of the students at England’s two universities, often did not bother to take their degree, they were only there for the ride.
In 1869, Harvard was much like medieval universities, with the same limited set of subjects being taught and little emphasis on research. Meanwhile, in Germany, universities were changing to the Humboldtian model. This was much like today’s universities. This slowly spread to universities in other countries. Until the 1920’s, the German university system was clearly the best in the world. Then in the 1930’s a lot of German academics decided that it would be a good idea to get out of there, so soon there were a lot of German academics teaching in other countries: